Lefebvre and the Cities of Exploitation
One street in Recoleta, two brothels, and a judicial investigation offer a way to explore how economic and social relations produce spaces of exploitation. And why reclaiming a building does not necessarily mean reclaiming the territory.
A Swedish couple spent more than forty-five minutes wandering among the graves of Recoleta Cemetery. They photographed the tombs of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Eva Perón, along with an enormous statue of a man wearing a robe and mid-calf boots. They did not know it, but the statue depicted the boxer Luis Ángel Firpo. By the time they finished their visit and left the cemetery, the neighborhood’s bars and restaurants were beginning to fill with tourists emerging from the cemetery—or the Museum of Fine Arts—employees stopping for a drink before heading home, and couples or groups of friends who had come because the area was fashionable.
Weaving their way past tourists, employees, couples, and friends, they followed the cobblestones until they reached Vicente López Street and turned right. The little sunlight that remained did not bother them. The trees on the opposite sidewalk, leaning toward the cemetery, formed a kind of green umbrella sheltering everyone and everything as far as the intersection with Presidente José Evaristo Uriburu Street. Uriburu himself is buried on the other side of the cemetery wall, although in a mausoleum that visitors rarely photograph.
Across from the cemetery, the bars reappear along Vicente López Street. The preceding block, the one with the leaning trees, is occupied almost entirely by a shopping mall housing exclusive brands and a branch of the local government. The bars appear again, but the couple prefer to walk along the opposite sidewalk, avoiding diners, restaurant employees holding menus, and pedestrians approaching from the other direction.
They also avoid young men whose quick arm movements are intended to catch the attention of men walking alone or in groups. They try to hand them small, single-color flyers featuring a woman's photograph, a mobile phone number, and a phrase of no more than three words. Other young men, dressed with pretentious elegance, approach the bars and try to strike up conversations with men gathered around the tables. They, too, carry flyers, but of better quality—printed on finer paper, that is, although their design remains sophisticatedly vulgar.
At the corner of Vicente López and Azcuénaga, a succession of establishments begins, with burly men dressed in black standing outside their entrances, talking among themselves until another man decides to go inside. Usually, when someone arrives, he carries one of those sophisticatedly vulgar flyers, signed by one of the pretentiously elegant young men. Many residents, tourists, and occasional passersby avoid walking along those sidewalks. Most know who the men dressed in black are. Almost everyone recognizes the people handing out flyers. Both kinds. But nearly everyone walking through the area, whether Swedish, Argentine, or Japanese, knows what the people distributing the flyers are advertising and what the men in black are guarding. And none of that was built in just a few days.
The Production of Space
Henri Lefebvre devoted much of his life to observing how people interacted in everyday life, how those relationships shaped space, and how space, in turn, conditioned them. Lefebvre was a philosopher and sociologist with a Marxist orientation, but perhaps the most important aspect of understanding his work is that he lived through the transformations of postwar France, during the Trente Glorieuses, three decades of modernization, economic growth, industrialization, and expanding consumption.
During the Second World War, numerous industrial regions, railway networks, and port areas across France were bombed by the Allies, particularly before and after the Normandy landings. Factories, workshops, roads, railway lines, ports, and hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged during the war, especially by aerial bombardment.
By the time France was liberated, reconstruction had become a necessity. The process involved not only building new factories and housing but also created opportunities for the state to intervene increasingly in the planning and technical organization of urban life. Lefebvre challenged the planners and bureaucrats who regarded blueprints, zoning schemes, and functional divisions as instruments capable of organizing urban life.
Urban planning increasingly separated industrial areas from residential neighborhoods, while large housing developments multiplied on the outskirts of cities. Spaces devoted to work, housing, commerce, and entertainment began to be organized according to distinct functions. Throughout these decades, Lefebvre examined how the reorganization of space transformed social relations, even as those same relations contributed to producing new spatial configurations.
In 1974, Lefebvre published The Production of Space, in which he argued that space was not neutral. Societies produced not only systems, institutions, laws, social relations, and commodities, but also the spaces necessary for their functioning and reproduction. For Lefebvre, cities, neighborhoods, and streets were not neutral settings in which those relations unfolded, but were themselves products of those relations.
Three Cities on the Same Street
The history of the Recoleta neighborhood dates back to the sixteenth century, when the first small farms devoted to cultivation and sheep breeding began to appear. In the early eighteenth century, Franciscan friars belonging to the Order of the Discalced Recollects settled in the area and undertook the construction of the Church of Our Lady of the Pillar, on what is now Azcuénaga Street.
In 1822, a few years after independence, the cemetery that now bears the neighborhood’s name was established on the former orchard of the Recollect friars’ church. Before the yellow fever epidemic devastated southern Buenos Aires and wealthy families moved north, the cemetery, paradoxically, was home to a considerable proportion of the area's permanent residents.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, urban reforms promoted by Torcuato de Alvear, the first municipal mayor of Buenos Aires, encouraged the opening of boulevards and the creation of parks and small public squares. Meanwhile, those recently relocated families of the Buenos Aires aristocracy built mansions and palatial residences inspired by French architecture, many of which still stand today. This architectural style contributed, in part, to the city acquiring the title of the Paris of South America, although it shares that distinction with quite a few other cities.
One might say that the history of Vicente López Street is layered. At different moments, the area surrounding Vicente López was associated with the cemetery, the neighborhood’s residential expansion, and, later, the growth of tourism, restaurants, and nightlife. The architecture of certain buildings communicates to the outside world what takes place within them. Churches, schools, and hospitals, for example, can often be recognized by their architectural language without having to read a sign on the facade. Something similar occurs with certain establishments associated with sexual exploitation.
Drawing on Lefebvre’s ideas, space can be analyzed through three interconnected dimensions. The first is to understand space as a historical product of economic, political, and social relations. Economic activities produce recognizable spaces and, over time, generate particular architectural and commercial codes that can be interpreted even by people who have never set foot inside them.
Dark facades, dimly lit—particularly with red lights—an excessive number of security guards at the entrance, and names conspicuously lacking in originality or good taste are among the signals that many men learn to interpret as part of a commercial and architectural code. Inside, the tables, the bars, the women moving from one table to another, the security guards stationed in the corners, and the surveillance cameras overhead—three eyes in every corner watching both clients and women—are also part of a recognizable spatial organization found in certain establishments devoted to profiting from prostitution.
The second dimension is space as an instrument, because its organization makes it possible to distribute functions, regulate activities, and exercise power. The architecture of an establishment can serve to attract customers, organize their movements, and control access to particular areas. Entrances, corridors, rooms, and the boundaries between public and private space do not necessarily serve the same purpose for those who run the business, those who pay to enter, and those who are exploited inside. The very same architecture that facilitates entry and movement for some can be used to restrict the freedom of others.
Finally, the third dimension is space as a condition. Historically shaped spaces facilitate certain activities while making others more difficult. A port does not determine the existence of drug trafficking, but its logistical infrastructure, international commercial connections, and potential networks of corruption can be exploited by criminal organizations. Similarly, areas with concentrations of housing, tourist attractions, restaurants, and nightlife establishments may offer favorable conditions for businesses associated with sexual exploitation. Yet these territorial characteristics do not, in themselves, explain the existence of crime.
Nor does the presence of state institutions, by itself, guarantee that an area is protected. In Recoleta, some four hundred meters from the brothel along Vicente López Street, or four hundred and fifty meters along Azcuénaga Street, one would come upon Argentina’s Ministry of Security. Within a five-block radius of the cemetery stood the offices where national security policies were devised—including policies aimed at combating sexual exploitation—alongside the most exclusive brothels, bars, restaurants, and some of the most Parisian architecture in the entire city.
The Exploitation of Everyday Life
In Argentina, many businesses are given names formed from the first syllables of their owners’ names, or those of their children or partners. But at a brothel in the Recoleta neighborhood, its owners sought to lend it a sophistication it did not possess simply by adding an apostrophe and a final s, in the style of certain English business names. Mario and Daniel owned the brothel on the corner of Vicente López and Azcuénaga. They also owned another in Mar del Plata, on Alem Street. Coincidence or fetish, both establishments stood on streets named after Argentine politicians.
Inside the brothel, the women wore very little clothing. Some wore only a bra and shorts; others wore extremely short dresses. The women's dress code did not allow trousers. Customers were also subject to a dress code, unless they were celebrities. Most of the men wore shirts, and shorts, caps, and sports jackets were not permitted. The men responsible for enforcing the dress code—among other things—were the burly figures dressed in black who stood talking among themselves until a man decided to enter the establishment.
When the men ordered a drink, usually alcoholic, they received an ordinary-sized beverage and paid roughly what they would have paid at any other bar or nightclub in the area. But when one of them wanted a woman he found particularly attractive, provided she was not already talking to another man, to sit beside him, remain there for a while, and pretend to be excited at the prospect of having sex with him, he had to pay several times as much for her drink as he had paid for his own, even though the women generally did not drink it.
That drink was a condition Mario and Daniel had imposed in their brothels—a practice also found in others—before a woman could leave the establishment to have sex in one of the hotels on the block. This arrangement allowed the owners to profit from sexual encounters subsequently arranged through the purchase of drinks, without having to formally account for that income as a share of the money received by the women being prostituted there.
The business was not merely about selling drinks at extraordinary prices, but about controlling the conditions under which men could purchase half an hour of sex with a woman. Mario and Daniel controlled the entry of both men and women, as well as the conditions under which the encounters took place. They determined how long people stayed, how they moved, and how much time these encounters lasted, both inside and outside the brothel. Space alone was nothing; controlling and organizing it was what enabled them to make money.
When a man purchased his half-hour of sex, the selected woman went to a changing room, picked up a coat long enough to cover most of her exposed body, and the two walked to one of the nearby hotels. Most of the rooms were occupied by tourist families looking for accommodation close to the city's main attractions. Others remained available for sexual encounters with women from that brothel and others along Vicente López Street. Mario and Daniel's other brothel in Mar del Plata stood next to a hotel belonging to a well-known international chain, whose rooms were also used for purchased sexual encounters.
After the half-hour at the hotel, the woman had another thirty minutes to return to the brothel, remove her coat, and sit beside another man who requested her company, remain with him for a while, and pretend to be excited at the prospect of having sex again. If she took longer than thirty minutes to return, she had to pay a fine equivalent to the price of the drink men purchased in order to sit with her.
At four in the morning, the establishment began to empty of men, and the women could change their clothes and return home, try to enjoy themselves somewhere that was still open, or feel genuinely excited about having sex with someone of their own choosing. But only after four in the morning, when all the neighborhood's restaurants had already closed and the bars were beginning to shut their doors.
After an afternoon exploring the cemetery, walking through the neighborhood of Buenos Aires's aristocracy, having dinner at a restaurant on Junín Street, and ending the evening at a bar on Presidente José Evaristo Uriburu Street, the Swedish couple were walking hand in hand along Vicente López at half past four in the morning when they crossed paths with a crowd of women emerging from three establishments on the same street, including Mario and Daniel's.
To sexually exploit these women, the owners did not need to pave streets or construct the premises, the hotels, the bars, or the restaurants. Still less did they need to build the cemetery or promote the city as a tourist destination. Yet they were able to exploit the women all the same. Because sexual exploitation was not separate from the city; it took place within it.
But the neighborhood was not inhabited solely by people directly or indirectly connected to the brothels, bars, restaurants, or cemetery. There were also residents, social activists, and other churches besides that of the Recollect friars. In February 2012, following a series of meetings organized by a social organization and a local priest, residents, joined by other organizations, marched for the first time to demand the closure of the brothel.
Reclaiming Space
For much of September 19, 2014, a conference of dentists occupied one of the largest function rooms at the Sheraton Hotel in Mar del Plata. That evening, when the Madaho’s brothel—adjacent to the hotel belonging to the well-known international chain—opened its doors, many of the dentists who had attended the conference walked a few meters and entered the brothel.
At around one in the morning, officers from the Airport Security Police entered the brothel, accompanied by staff from the National Program for the Rescue and Assistance of Trafficking Victims and officials from the court and prosecutor’s office responsible for the judicial investigation. The lights were switched on, the music was turned off, and the twenty-four women—twenty-two Argentines, one Brazilian, and one Dominican—were separated from the more than fifty men.
That night marked the conclusion of the first stage of a lengthy judicial process that would lead, among other developments, to Mario, Daniel, and other members of the organization being sentenced, through an abbreviated trial procedure, to three-year suspended prison sentences for the sexual exploitation of the women rescued on September 20, 2014.
The judicial investigation in Mar del Plata led to the voluntary closure of the brothel in Recoleta. Two years after the raid, the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation overturned the decision of the Mar del Plata Court of Appeals to dismiss the charges against the defendants and ordered that they be investigated for money laundering.
Almost ten years later, another chamber of the Court of Cassation upheld the indictment of Jorge Ferro—a member of the Mar del Plata Court of Appeals who had dismissed the charges against the defendants—on charges of breach of official duties, illicit enrichment, and influence peddling, in proceedings connected to the brothel’s owners. All these investigations remain open to this day.
The court overseeing the investigation in Mar del Plata ordered the seizure of the property where Madaho’s had operated for almost thirty years and placed it in the custody and administration of the Asociación Civil por un Mundo Igualitario (AMI), an organization dedicated to defending and promoting the rights of the LGBTIQ+ community. AMI transformed the property into a cultural center that also provides support to members of the community particularly affected by the dynamics of sexual exploitation.
In Recoleta, the former brothel first became an attractive commercial property on a street corner that remained vacant for two years. A bank subsequently opened there, and today it is a supermarket. The buildings are still there. So are the cemetery, the hotels, the bars, and the restaurants. The pretentiously elegant young men handing out sophisticatedly vulgar flyers are no longer seen. But small, single-color flyers featuring a woman’s photograph, a mobile phone number, and a phrase of no more than three words are still being distributed.
A recent investigation revealed that Mario and Daniel were connected to another brothel in Recoleta. The establishment was raided and shut down in 2026. During the operation, women who were being sexually exploited were rescued. Criminal organizations do not need to retain the same buildings for their activities to continue. Buildings can be renovated, their facades transformed, and their premises converted into supermarkets, while the economic relations, networks of intermediaries, and an age-old cultural tradition persist—one that regards repeated sexual encounters with different people in exchange for money as either work or entertainment, depending on the position each person occupies in that exchange.
Judicial intervention interrupted the criminal activity, but it could not, on its own, transform the relationships and conditions within the territory. For Lefebvre, territory was not merely a setting; it was both the result and the condition of those relationships. Reclaiming it therefore requires more than closing buildings or changing their purpose. It also means transforming the practices that organize the territory. The state must encourage and guarantee that possibility, but it is the everyday social relationships constructed within and around these spaces that determine the extent of the transformation. We will have to keep walking to discover what other stories lie hidden behind their walls.
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